The Labyrinth is one of the founding myths of André Masson's work. It symbolises the unconscious and desire according to Freud, the psychoanalyst so dear to André Breton, and Lacan, who later became André Masson's brother-in-law. The ancient Greek legend of Daedalus contrasts the labyrinth with white cities bathed in Mediterranean light, representing the order of reason. By killing the Minotaur, a creature half-man, half-animal, Theseus, hero of Athens, in the dark labyrinth created by a despot, the order of reason and philosophy triumphs. Nietzsche, a philosopher who influenced André Masson's thinking from an early age, revolutionarily proclaimed that ‘The labyrinth must be our model!’
From the earliest days of Surrealism, Antonin Artaud diagnosed the ills of modern society in the rationalism and materialism that gave rise to the First World War.

Surrealism therefore identified with the Minotaur and the labyrinth. It was no coincidence that its main publication was called Le Minotaure, and that André Masson designed its second cover. A symbol of the Freudian unconscious, the labyrinth also responded to the need for a modern mythology, a call that André Breton made very early on. Carl Jung, whom André Masson preferred to his master Freud, considered myths to be symbols of a collective mythology in his archetypes.

André Masson often confused the Minotaur with his prison. The labyrinth unfolds in the belly of the Minotaur. In a unique approach to the myth, it is the former that contains the latter.